Add Ubuntu 9.04 boot entry to Vista / Windows 7 boot manager

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my old Shuttle box a couple of months ago to test some of my plugins on XBMC for Linux. The installer was smart enough to included the Windows XP boot entry and all was good until I installed Windows 7 later on, overwriting Grub with it’s own boot manager.

EasyBCD was the first thing that came to mind, they even have this tutorial on how to add Ubuntu to Vista loader. Adding the Ubuntu partition as per tutorial didn’t do it for me, and then I found this post explaining how to use EasyBCD to install NeoGrub.

I’m not a Grub expert so I went on and booted with Ubuntu Live CD to get the original /boot/grub/menu.lst, saved it on a temp directory on one of NTFS partitions, came back and booted in Windows 7. Run EasyBCD and follow the post to add the NeoGrub boot entry and saved the menu.lst directly in F:\NST.

Choosing the Ubuntu 9.04 boot entry now starts Grub showing it’s own boot entries, but you I could probably customize menu.lst so that it starts Ubuntu directly (timeout=0, default=0).

Catalyst 9.3 Vista legacy drivers on Windows 7

I had a problem starting XBMC on Windows 7 on my old Shuttle destkop with an ATI Radeon 9600 XT graphics card and the default W7 graphics driver – ATI discontinued support for a bunch of old graphic chips including mine, I went and on ATI website for a driver for Windows 7 and Radeon 9600 is not in the list anymore.

Luckily MerlinUK posted on ATI forums how to install the ATI Catalyst 9.3 legacy drivers for Windows Vista on Windows 7 and it works, XBMC running fine now, see below.

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http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=111846

MerlinUK
04/12/2009 08:38 PM

I have been trying to find a way of installing Catalyst 9.3 in Windows 7 to support my X700 AGP card. After a bit of trial and error, I have found a way that this can be done. This not only installs the 9.3 drivers but also allows use of Catalyst control center. This method should work for all legacy cards supported by catalyst 9.3.

There are five Step to the installation although step five is optional.

Step 1: Start the installation as normal upto main installation then cancel. This will extract the driver files to your hard drive.

Step 2: navigate to C:\ATI\Support\9_3_vista32_win7_32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\pakages\drivers\display\LH_INF. Open in notepad CL_76828.inf and look for the following entry;

[Manufacturer]
%ATI% = ATI.Mfg, NTx86.6.0, NTx86.6.1

edit it to read

[Manufacturer]
%ATI% = ATI.Mfg, NTx86.6.0

and save

Step 3: manually install the display driver by clicking on start and entering Device Manager in the search box select your graphics adaptor and update driver select the second option and have disk browse to the inf file you saved in Step 2. Windows will display a warning but click yes

Step 4: Navigate to; C:\ATI\Support\9_3_vista32_win7_32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu and run setup this will install the Catalyst control center without error. reboot and hey presto

Step 5: Not strictly needed but will save you having to do the above again if you have to re-install Windows 7, save the ATI folder to a USB drive or CD. Just follow steps 3 & 4 in any order.

And that is it, hope this helps...

E3 2009: Project Natal Milo demo

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/

Lionhead Studios' Peter Molyneux has shown off a game character that recognises and responds to a player's mood.

The human interaction system is possible with Natal, a system being developed for the Xbox 360.